Hello everyone! Blowout 1.4 is here with some massive updates for Bedrock support and some big upgrades - let's break it all down!

Democracy Is Important

As Blowout continues to grow, it's time for the lobby to get an upgrade! Enjoy the new explosive hub while you wait for your match to start, and to celebrate your victories!

This lobby isn't just a place to hang out though, there's a big new update: Map Voting!

Now, when your game is about to begin, you will be presented with three Blowout maps selected at random. Simple punch the corresponding bee to cast your vote, with votes being tallied above each Boomblebee.

After 30 seconds, the map with the most votes (or one of them selected at random in the case of a tie) will be selected, and your match will begin!

We're hoping that this upgrade allows for more variety in the games played in Blowout, and gives you all a chance to play the new maps whenever they come up!

Upgraded Bedrock Support

Blowout (and leg.gg in general) are one of the few places where you can play our minigames on both Java and Bedrock. While everything we do on the server is Java-first as far as how we design these features, we still want our bedrock players to have a good time - which means this update has a lot of features focused on them!

Today, we're rolling out three main fixes for Bedrock users, those being a (now visible) particle-based visible border, blocks going to your hotbar instead of offhand where Bedrock won't let you use them, and a functional resource pack! This brings the awesome music of Blowout created by Sierra to every platform that the game can be played on, along with updated textures for the game.

What's the Buzz?

We have a brand new weapon for Blowout, welcome the Bombblebee Grenade! This explosive projectile spawns between 2-5 hostile bees when it lands, causing some homing buzzing bundles of danger to fly your opponent's way!

Copper? I Hardly...

We've released a new map! The first community created map submitted by one of the testers of Leg.GG - this is TRIAL by Mighty Marauder!

The Central Spawner can be mined for almost HALF A STACK of blocks!

There are two new maps actively in development, and I'll reveal the codenames, those being Blossom and Dojo, and both will be coming soon 🗡️

Peeking Behind the Scenes

On a technical level, I want to take some time here to shout out Ryzech and the amazing work they've done for improving the deploy process for Blowout. Previously, it required manually copying files to each server individually which was a long and tedious process.

Over the past few weeks Ryz has designed and implemented a new deployment system that allows for instantly deploying to and upgrading all Blowout servers with just a few commands on any developer's local machine. This takes deploys from hours to minutes - and will help make future upgrades trivial.

The amount of work that we've been doing BTS to get new tools and infrastructure might seem like a lot, and things have taken a bit for this update, but this work is totally invisible when it's done right and Ryz has knocked it out of the park with this one.

What's next?

Next week, we'll be talking about some big upgrades on the Leg.GG hub and meta-progression on the server overall, as well as another peek into SMP+ Season 6 and our next new game.

Get ready to move! 🏃

Changelog

  • HUB
    • Improved Matchmaking Logic
      • Fixed the "Instant Queue" Bug
      • Improved Sound Feedback
      • Improved Player State Tracking
  • BLOWOUT
    • Added Map Voting
    • New Waiting / Postgame Lobby!
    • New Map - Trial
    • New Weapons
      • Bomb-Bul-Bee Grenade
        • Spawns 3-5 hostile bees at the point of impact. Bees will target the closest player.
        • Bees do not inflict poison
        • Bees explode when they die.
    • Updated Scoreboard Holograms
    • Fixed a bug preventing Creeper Eggs from functioning
    • Fixed a bug where Creeper Explosions don't damage the player
      • This opens up a TON of new tech with Creeper Explosions and launches
    • Fixed Advancement notifications going out on Echo
    • Fixed some "lore moss" on Dust
    • Bedrock support and upgrades
      • Added particle border for Bedrock users only
      • Bedrock players will have blocks placed in their hotbar instead of offhand
      • Changed some titles to use Text instead of custom Unicode for Bedrock players
    • Added Bedrock Resource Pack support